Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Elite’ On Netflix, About A Culture Clash At A Private School That Ends In Murder

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Elite

For some reason or another, we can’t get enough of dark high school dramas (there’s a reason why Riverdale has become a cultural touchstone the last couple of years). And it seems the demand is worldwide, as streaming services have given us a number of international shows built around high school intrigue. The Spanish series Elite is the latest of these shows. Is it as much trashy fun as their American counterparts?

Opening Shot: A student, with blood on his face and hands and in a shocked haze, wanders the halls of his prep school.

The Gist: We flash back to the first day for Samuel (Itzan Escamilla) at the super-exclusive prep school Las Encinas, a school where Spain’s most wealthy and influential people send their kids. He’s one of three from his public school, San Esteban, to get scholarships to Las Encinas after the roof collapsed during an earthquake; the construction company paid for the three scholarships in an attempt to head off bad publicity. The other two are Christian (Miguel Herrán) a chatty underachiever who got injured in the roof collapse and Nadia (Mina El Hammani), a high-achieving student who was likely given a scholarship because she’s Muslim.

The three of them are immediately looked at with disdain by the privileged students, especially Guzmán (Miguel Bernardeau), the self-fashioned dude in charge. He calls Samuel a “waiter” to signify that he’s working class. However, Guzmán’s sister Marina (María Pedraza) takes a liking to Samuel, mainly because she shuns the trappings of her life, including the coming out party her parents are planning for her.

Guzmán’s girlfriend Lu (Danna Paola) is especially suspicious of Nadia, who makes no pretense that she wants to get along with the rich kids. Nadia has enough to worry about, given the fact that the school makes her take of her hijab, calling it an “accessory”.

Samuel’s brother Nano (Jaime Lorente) comes home after a stint in jail for a vandalism incident, and he’s angrier than ever that he gets locked up, but the developer of San Esteban gets no time behind bars. He drags Samuel along to tag the builder’s house, but leave before he could finish.

The next night is the party. All three of the scholarship students go through various invites (Marina invited Samuel, for instance), and Samuel is horrified to find that Marina and Guzmán’s father is the developer whose house he and Nano tagged the night before.

Photo: Manuel Fernandez-Valdes/Netflix

Our Take: Our summary above can’t even come close to explaining what goes on in the first episode of Elite, a Spanish series created by Darío Madrona and Carlos Montero. There’s Marina’s brother Omar (Omar Ayuso) who is buddies with Samuel and deals weed to Christian; Ander (Arón Piper), the son of the principal who has a drinking problem, hasn’t come out of the closet yet, and has little use for the rich kids who he used to be friends with; Lu’s buddy Carla (Ester Expósito), likes the loquacious Christian, and it seems that her longtime boyfriend Polo (Álvaro Rico) is OK with it. We also see Lu scheming with Guzmán to take her down a peg after Nadia catches them having sex in the shower of the school’s locker room.

But the focus of the first episode is Samuel and Marina. The last time there was a scholarship student in Las Encinas, he had a relationship with Marina that left lifelong affects, but she’s still more attuned to the working class than the high-society snobbery her family practices. Maybe it’s the dangerous aspect of such a relationship; we see her flirting with Nano, too, despite their age difference. Escamilla and Pedraza have great chemistry as Samuel and Marina, and when we find out at the end of the episode just who was murdered, it makes us eagerly anticipate how their relationship develops through the season.

Elite is trashy and scandalous, but no moreso than anything you might see coming from American producers. In fact, the production has all the hallmarks of fantastically salacious Peak TV writing: Culture clashes, bad guys you almost root for because they’re so ingenious in their malice, lots of pretty young people, sex, people who are hiding their true selves, and more. And it’s all presented in a way that it makes sense and doesn’t careen from one story to another. It’s a well-paced hour, and it tells just enough story for all the characters where they all become intriguing.

Photo: Manuel Fernandez-Valdes/Netflix

Sex and Skin: We mentioned the sex in the shower, but the first time we see skin is when the rich kids hide Christian’s uniform after he goes swimming. Instead of panicking, he proudly walks naked through the school, inviting people to look, as he tries to find his clothes.

Parting Shot: We see who was murdered. Then Samuel flashes back to that person looking back at him while walking down the hall at school, then disappearing.

Sleeper Star: Paola does a great job as Lu, a smart kid who revels in the fact that she’s smarter than everyone else. She’s a classic “wicked” villain, and she embodies the role perfectly.

Most Pilot-y Line: We get that in Europe, Muslims are seen as second class citizens by many. But the casual racism against Nadia, like Guzmán saying she wears a turban, seems egregious. These kids are already obnoxious; do they need to be racist, too?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Elite is deliciously trashy fare in a slick package. And there’s more than enough there to hold your interest for a full season.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.